Posts Tagged ‘queen street west’

I took ten photos of Trinity Bellwoods Park early on the afternoon of the 10th of May, walking south from Dundas Street West south towards the cherry blossoms by Queen West, The park was vivifying, becoming ever greener almost with every step I took.

blogTO reports on an upcoming concert scheduled for the TTC’s Lower Bay station on the 11th of March.

A new student residence for Ryerson University with prices actually comparable to prevailing rents for a studio apartment downtown seems like not the best solution to student housing issues. blogTO reports.

The upcoming formation of a new island, Villiers Island off the mouth of the Don, as part of the Port Lands renewal is very cool. blogTO reports.

Julien Gignac writes at the Toronto Star about the Saigon Flower, a Vietnamese restaurant on Queen Streeet West in the shadow of the Drake with an owner who refuses to sell. I have eaten there, and enjoyed it; I applaud her.

The disruption being inflicted on Little Jamaica, an enclave stretching along an Eglinton Avenue West being disrupted by Crosstown construction, is sad. Is there any alternative, though, if we want more transit? What can be done for the neighbourhood? The Toronto Starreports.

As I promised yesterday, here is some more of the art that I saw at the TD Gallery’s Toronto Revealed exhibition. Although some of the works (paintings, today, mostly painted in oils) depicted scenes predating my arrival in Toronto or even my existence, like that showing the excavation of the Eaton Centre, most of the others were scenes that I recognized with delight from my daily life. One, of a nondescript gas station, was based on a location at most a lazy ten minutes’ walk from my home.

More details on the individual works–their names, their painters, their dates–can be found by clicking through to my Flickr page.

Yesterday evening, I was standing on Queen just west of Dufferin, waiting for the 501 bus, when I looked to my northeast. I remember when there were no substantial condo tower there, way back when I used to live in Parkdale behind the Drake.

The strikingly halved house at 54 1/2 St. Patrick Avenue, lone survivor of what was a stretch of row houses on this street north of Queen Street West and just a couple minutes’ walk west from University Avenue, has received international attention, from sites like Atlas Obscura and Amusing Planet. In April of 2013, blogTO’s Chris Bateman explained how this building came to be and just how it managed to survive.

The row of houses was built between 1890 and 1893 on what was first Dummer Street, then William Street, then, finally, St. Patrick Street. The names of the roads in this part of the city area have been shuffled more than most: St. Patrick Street used to refer to the stretch of road that’s now part of Dundas west of McCaul; McCaul used to be William Henry Street, then West William Street, for example.

For much of its past the street was blighted by poverty. Early photos show severe faces, crumbling wall cladding, and backyards strewn with detritus. More recently the area between University and Spadina has been home to a large Chinese community.

Starting in 1957, most of the block bound by Queen, McCaul, St. Patrick, and Dundas Street was purchased in pieces by Windlass Holdings Ltd., the company that developed the Village by the Grange, sometimes using aggressive tactics to secure land deeds.

The owner of 54 St. Patrick Street – once part of the original terrace – complained to the Toronto Star that the company’s actions were “an extreme example of blockbusting,” claiming he had received over 300 directives on his property in a single year.

Despite some resistance, the owners of the homes sold up at different times, and the row was pulled down in pieces like tooth extractions. The sole-survivor pictured here was once in the third house in the row from the south – the similar buildings next door are a later addition built on top of a laneway.

Instead, the company demolished its neighbour to the north with surgical precision, ensuring not even the woodwork on the facade of the hold-out building was disturbed. An internal supporting wall became a blank exterior when the house next door came down.

Also in 2013, Patty Winsa wrote in the Toronto Star about the house from the perspective of its current owner.

The 120-year-old residence at 54 ½ St. Patrick St. bears the scars of a development battle.

The Victorian row house was awkwardly severed from its neighbour in the 1970s when the owners refused to sell, and it lacks the symmetry of another side.

It is literally “half a house,” says its current owner, Albert Zikovitz, laughingly from his adjacent office in the Cottage Life Magazine building. “Everybody looks at it.”

The house is one of a few single-family homes left on the densely packed street near Queen and University. But Zikovitz, who purchased the house last year after the owner went into a retirement home, says he won’t tear it down.

“I love the house,” says Zikovitz, who is president of the magazine. Plans are in the works this year to restore the exterior of the building and turn the interior into office space.

Work was being done on the house when I passed by Tuesday evening. Here’s to hoping this anomaly survives: the reflexive double-take of passersby is fun.